Facebook debuts new social “Questions” feature

Facebook on Wednesday began rolling out a new beta application, called Facebook Questions, that lets its members pose questions to and share answers with millions of people around the world.

“Facebook Questions helps you tap into the collective knowledge of the more than 500 million people on Facebook,” Blake Ross, the company’s director of product, wrote in a blog post.

“For example, if you’re vacationing in Costa Rica and want to know the best places to surf, you can use Facebook Questions to get answers from nearby surfing enthusiasts,” Ross said. “Because questions will also appear to your friends and their friends, you’ll receive answers that are more personalized to you.”

And, Ross added, “with this new application, you can get a broader set of answers and learn valuable information from people knowledgeable on a range of topics.”

For now, Facebook Questions is a beta product being rolled out slowly, starting with about one percent of the Palo Alto company’s membership. A spokeswoman said the company wants to evaluate the test feedback before rolling the feature out more widely.

Facebook has been rumored to be working on a new question application for some time, but the official roll out coincidentally started just a day after search site Ask.com of Oakland began promoting its similar social questions model that also lets members seek answers from the community at large.

But unquestionably, Facebook is also going after a larger share of the general search engine traffic dominated by Google. And it’s also a challenge to question-and-answer site Quora, a startup founded by former Facebook employees, and to Twitter, whose members can also seek answers from their followers.

I had early access to Facebook Questions, which appeared as a link on the left side of the home page and as a more prominent link above the status feed between “Update Status,” “Add Photos” and “Post Link.”

It was already filled with questions, including:

Is it possible to be insane in the mind and have a good heart?

Where does the saying ‘catch 22′ come from? What does it mean?

What is the meaning of life?

Will Mark Zuckerberg go see “The Social Network”?

That last question refers to an uncomplimentary movie coming out this fall about the Facebook co-founder. A Facebook engineer answered, “If I were him I’d wait for it on DVD.”

My first question to the community was: Does anybody find this new Facebook Questions feature more useful than Google so far?

There were no immediate replies, but then again, maybe that’s an answer that remains to be seen.